Apple is now a computer company again

The Mac is seeing more innovation than the iPhone has in years.

Apple Mac Studio

Apple's new Mac Studio with M1 Ultra chip promises powerful performance.

Photo: Apple

Apple makes most of its money from sales of the iPhone, a device that gets reliably and incrementally better every September. But if the company's first product launch event of the year is any indication, Apple's foundational gadget is its most exciting. The Mac is seeing more innovation — and more attention — than it has since the iPhone launched in 2007.

Apple's spring event is typically a smattering of new stuff, most of it iterative updates, and on Tuesday morning the news out of Cupertino seemed solidly in that vein. Tim Cook and a stream of executives teased Apple TV+ content, showed off not one but two shades of green for the iPhone 13 lineup, and took the wraps off a $429 third-gen iPhone SE (the one with the fingerprint sensor), now upgraded with an A15 Bionic chip, 5G, a better camera and lengthier battery life. Apple also announced a refreshed $599 iPad Air with an M1 chip, bringing iPad Pro-level power to the company's mid-tier tablet.

But then the event swiftly turned into a Mac showcase. A new M1 Ultra chip will power Apple's most advanced computer: a square aluminum box called the Mac Studio, which is designed to be paired with the new Studio Display, the first relatively affordable (at $1,599, emphasis on relatively) external monitor Apple has made in years. Altogether the announcements indicate that reinventing the Mac continues to be high priority for Apple — perhaps more so than even the iPhone.

Until Apple introduced its custom M1 chip in 2020, its computers were languishing. Apple continued to release new models with slightly upgraded specs each year, but "innovated" on Mac design with near-universally loathed butterfly-switch keyboards, a weird Touch Bar feature and bodies so slim they had basically no ports, forcing users to buy dongles to attach peripherals.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began and buyers started snapping up laptops in droves, Apple got serious about upgrading the Mac. The company had long been rumored to be planning a move away from Intel, with the goal of building on its chip development for iPhones with custom Mac processors. Bringing all of its chips in-house proved a turning point: The company could use the overhaul to address years of criticisms over underwhelming (or outright bad) Mac features and also wow pandemic laptop shoppers with bold performance and battery-life claims. Though the iPhone will remain the company’s breadwinner for the foreseeable future, Apple knows it needs to diversify: with more affordable products, with subscription services and with Macs people are actually excited to use.

The company has since overhauled its Mac lineup with custom silicon, in the process making entry-level MacBooks more useful with dramatically longer battery life and its pro-level Macs more powerful. Case in point: the new Mac Studio with M1 Ultra, which promises 3.8 times faster processing power than the 27-inch, Intel-powered iMac released in 2020.

Meanwhile, the last few years of iPhone upgrades have delivered useful features — better cameras, 5G connectivity and MagSafe wireless charging, to name a few — but nowhere near the dramatic overhauls we've seen on the Mac side of things. (Rumor has it the iPhone 14 could inject some excitement into the lineup this September, but we'll see.)

The trio of Mac announcements today is just the beginning of what promises to be a huge year for Apple's computers. According to Bloomberg, the company plans to finish the third phase of moving Macs from Intel to in-house processors, and is expected to introduce an M2 chip to power new MacBooks and iMacs that will launch later this year.

Apple's prioritization of the Mac is clearly paying off: The company reported its highest Mac revenue ever, $10.8 billion, during the first quarter of 2022, up from $8.6 billion a year earlier and from $7.2 billion in the first quarter of 2017. The iPhone still runs laps around the Mac, with revenue of $71.6 billion in Q1 2022, but Apple doesn't have to sacrifice one product for another to succeed.

Now, about that touchscreen Mac...

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins